The Celestial Toymaker

While I’m recovering from surgery, I’m on strict limitations about how much weight I can lift and I am trying to strike a balance between moving around enough to restore my range of motion but stay calm and quiet enough that I allow myself to heal. Of course one of the best ways to get me to sit for a little while and take it easy is put on a good movie or TV show. By good fortune, the BBC released it’s BluRay of the Doctor Who episode “The Celestial Toymaker” on the day of my surgery. My wife kindly ran out and picked it up two days later. This episode goes all the way back to 1966, near the end of William Hartnell’s time portraying the Doctor. The Doctor’s companions are Steven Taylor played by Peter Purves and Dodo Chaplet played by Jackie Lane. The titular Toymaker was played by the legendary Michael Gough, who has portrayed characters ranging from Arthur Holmwood in Hammer’s Horror of Dracula to Alfred the Butler in the Tim Burton Batman films. This is one of the “lost” episodes. Only the fourth episode of the four-part serial exists in its entirety. So, the episode was recreated using 3-D animation from Shapeshifter Studios. On the BluRay set, you can watch it in full color or in black and white, as the episode would have been when originally aired.

Interest in releasing “The Celestial Toymaker” has been high, since the Toymaker’s return in Doctor Who’s 60th anniversary special “The Giggle,” this time with Neil Patrick Harris playing the Toymaker. That said, the Toymaker had originally been slated to appear in an episode with Colin Baker in the 1980s, but the episode was scrapped when the series went on hiatus. Fortunately, Big Finish adapted the script for audio and you can find “The Nightmare Fair” at: https://www.bigfinish.com/releases/v/doctor-who-the-nightmare-fair-421. My interest in the character came from seeing productions stills of the episode in a book about the series. The episode featured creepy clowns, surreal sets, living playing cards, and, of course, Michael Gough. I’d long wanted to see it.

The story’s premise is pretty straightforward. The Doctor’s TARDIS is pulled into a mysterious region of space controlled by the Toymaker, who offers the Doctor and his companions a challenge. If the Doctor and his companions succeed at a series of games, he’ll give them control of the TARDIS and they can leave. If they fail, they’ll essentially have to spend the rest of their lives in the Toymaker’s domain as his toys. The Doctor is given a complex logic puzzle called the Trilogic game, that he plays throughout the four episodes. In each of the four episodes, Steven and Dodo must play somewhat simpler games against the Toymaker’s toys. In the first episode they play Blind Man’s Bluff against a pair of clowns. In the second episode, they play against the king and queen of Hearts to find the one chair out of seven that won’t kill them. In episode three, they must find a key and find a way to dance across a floor of killer ballerinas to open door, and finally, in the fourth episode, they must play a game of hopscotch. The catch, if they step off the squares, they’ll die. At one point early in the first episode, the Doctor annoys the Toymaker and is turned invisible and mute. This actually allowed William Hartnell a two-week holiday during the episode’s filming. Interestingly, the production team had discussed making him return to visibility as a whole new actor, which would have made the regeneration narrative that ultimately was developed to explain actor changes a lot trickier down the road.

Because we do have one episode of the original and lots of still photos, we can get a sense of what the episode was like originally. The recurring toys were played by Carmen Silvera, Campbell Singer, and Peter Stephens, all popping up in new costumes each episode. The sets were fairly bare with just enough “dressing” to allow the actors to play the games. In the animated recreation, they went full-out and visualized twisting, large, surreal worlds. Blind-Man’s bluff was played on a gravity-defying stage where up and down, left and right changed depending on where in the game you were. The hopscotch game involved floating triangles and a misstep would mean a bad fall as well as electrocution. Overall, I thought the animation allowed the Toymaker’s world to come to wonderfully, creepy life. The character animation was quite good and fluid, and quite convincing in long shots. Animation allowed the toys to look like living toys rather than actors in fancy dress. My only real issue with the animation has to do with the way they chose to “paint” the characters. There were sharp tonal contrasts on the faces and hands with almost no gradient or blending between colors, giving the characters’ hands and faces a blotchy look. Shadows on faces sometimes made the characters look more like they needed a shave. Some characters looked like they had rather serious skin conditions on their hands. That noted, the contrasts work better in the black-and-white version than the full-color version.

One interesting historical aspect of this episode was the decision to dress the Toymaker in Traditional Chinese robes. Despite that, the makeup artists never gave Michael Gough the usual “yellowface” makeup that would have gone with a white actor playing an Asian role. At times, I felt like Gough was doing a very mild Asian accent. That said, Gough was actually born in Kuala Lumpur when Malaysia was a British Colony. So, now I’m even less certain he was doing anything deliberate with his accent or voice. I suspect the writers did literally mean “Celestial Toymaker” in the sense of a Toymaker with grand, cosmic powers. However, being the 1960’s, I wonder if the costume department thought “Celestial” in the sense of China as the “Celestial Empire” and brought over Chinese robes. Since money, time, and budgets were tight in those days, plus having a Toymaker who could literally wear whatever he imagined wearing, I suspect the filmmakers just rolled with it. A more problematic issue occurred in the second episode of the serial. At one point, the King of Hearts mutters the traditional “Eeenie Meenie Minie Mo” rhyme using a racist slur. In the new BluRay release, they seem to have wisely excised that part of the mumble. I don’t feel anything was lost with that.

If you like stories about great cosmic beings putting humans into surreal environments, you might also enjoy my novel Heirs of the New Earth. You can learn more about it at: http://davidleesummers.com/heirs_new_earth.html.

The Quest for Vampirella

As I’ve mentioned in other posts, I grew up with comic books and remained a fan through my college years. My interest waned after I left grad school as work, marriage, and children took increasing chunks of my time. However, as my kids reached an age to show an interest in comics, I sought out a new local comic shop in the 2010s and gradually began collecting again. Lurking on the shelves near the end of the alphabet was a woman vampire in a red outfit that was revealing by bathing suit standards. As a fan and writer of vampire stories who is also not immune to artwork designed to attract the male gaze, I picked up a copy or two. I don’t remember much about the earliest issues I read. The writing didn’t engage me enough to keep reading. I’ve since learned this was a period when the writing of Vampirella could be uneven, and a lot of the writers were experimenting with the character’s backstory.

Back around the new year, Tom Hutchison of Big Dog Ink Comics offered a special on some copies of the Vampirella archive editions. These hard cover books collected the earliest Vampirella comics as published by Warren Magazines starting in 1969. In that era, Warren sought to get around the restrictions of the Comic Code Authority by publishing black-and-white horror comics in magazine-sized editions. Their flagship publications were Creepy and Eerie, which I remember seeing on the shelves back in the day.

Vampirella was introduced as a third title to join the lineup in 1969. The title character was intended to be a horror hostess in the style of Vampira, who had been on television about a decade earlier. Vampirella’s “job” was to introduce different stories in each issue of the magazine. Vampirella herself was designed by cartoonist Trina Robbins and “revamped” by Frank Frazetta. Publisher James Warren had famed fan and writer Forrest J. Ackerman create a backstory for Vampirella, introducing her as an alien from the planet Drakulon where blood flowed in rivers, but began to dry up in the heat of the twin suns. When a hapless Earth space vessel crashed on Drakulon, Vampirella discovered that humans have blood in their veins and found her way to Earth. The story proved popular enough, a sequel was penned which described Vampirella on Earth, entering a contest to become Warren Magazine’s new hostess.

The Vampirella Archive Editions collect complete issues of those early magazines. You get the Vampirella stories and the stories she hosts. The Archive Editions are well worth reading if you want to see those early Vampirella stories in context. However, if you want to follow just her story arc, Dynamite Publishing has collected her stories into Vampirella: The Essential Warren Years.

The first two stories were silly, pun-laden fun, but weren’t really designed to engage the reader at a more emotional level. Still, something remarkable happened. Readers continued to want Vampirella stories, so Warren hired Archie Goodwin to pen several stories and the stories turned really good. Goodwin’s writing is enhanced by the art of Jose Gonzalez.

Ackerman’s last story imagined that Vampirella was on her way to a hosting gig when her plane crashed. Goodwin picked up the ball and imagined that one of her fellow passengers was a descendent of renowned vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing. The younger Van Helsing is found dead, drained of blood. Of course, Vampirella is blamed. The younger Van Helsing’s brother Conrad, and nephew Adam, begin to chase the hapless refugee from Drakulon. In the meantime, Vampirella takes refuge at a hospital where one of the doctors develops a blood serum that allows her to feed without drinking human blood. Unfortunately, the hospital also happens to be the lair of the Cult of Chaos, a group devoted to evil. Vampirella escapes the cult and eventually takes a job as assistant to a nearly washed-up, drunken magician Pendragon. Vampirella’s need for blood is nicely contrasted with Pendragon’s need for drink.

Authors such as Tom Sutton and Len Wein take up Vampirella’s story in later stories which were clearly inspired by such sources as the Hammer films of the late 1960s and early 1970s. There’s a strong story arc about Vampirella meeting Dracula. This is followed by a poignant story of Pendragon finding out what happened to his estranged wife and daughter. There’s even a story that posits that vampires have their origin in Ancient Egypt and that Vampirella is, in fact, the reincarnation of an Earth vampire of the period. I couldn’t help but wonder if Anne Rice took some inspiration from these stories when she conceived of the Egyptian origins of her vampires.

Returning to these early stories has allowed me to look at some of the later Vampirella stories with a fresh eye. I see how the writers have envisioned her as a good-hearted, but often misunderstood vampire. The best writers seem to acknowledge her campy and fun roots, while also giving her a solid adventure story.

While I can’t honestly say I was inspired by Vampirella, I was inspired by many of the writings and movies that inspired Warren’s authors. My vampires have ties to aliens. Like Vampirella, many can transform into bats. The vampires of my world attempt to help humanity and while they don’t have a blood serum, they try not to take lives unless it’s absolutely necessary. Author Lyn McConchie recently said my latest Scarlet Order novel was “A clever book that amused and enthralled me.” You can learn more about my Scarlet Order vampires at: http://davidleesummers.com/books.html#scarlet_order